As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increases, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of pushbuttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Many conventional user interfaces, such as those that include physical pushbuttons, are also inflexible. This may prevent a user interface from being configured and/or adapted by either an application running on the portable device or by users. When coupled with the time consuming requirement to memorize multiple key sequences and menu hierarchies, and the difficulty in activating a desired pushbutton, such inflexibility is frustrating to most users.
Some conventional user interfaces can be configured by users, thereby allowing at least partial customization. Unfortunately, the process of modifying such conventional user interfaces is often as cumbersome and complicated as the use of the conventional user interface itself. In particular, the required behaviors during configuration of such conventional user interfaces are often counterintuitive and the corresponding indicators guiding user actions are often difficult to understand. These challenges are often a source of additional frustration for users.
Accordingly, there is a need for more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for portable devices that enable a user to easily configure the user interface.
In addition, as a result of the small size of display screens on portable electronic devices, frequently only a portion of a web page of interest to a user can be displayed on the screen at a given time. Furthermore, the scale of display may be too small for comfortable or practical viewing. Users thus will frequently need to scroll and to scale a web page to view a portion of interest each time that they access the web page. However, the limitations of conventional user interfaces can cause this scrolling and scaling to be awkward to perform.
Accordingly, there is a need for portable multifunction devices with more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for creating widgets for displaying specified areas of web pages (i.e., for creating web-clip widgets) that are easy to use, configure, and/or adapt. In addition, once the web-clip widgets are created, there is a need for transparent and intuitive methods for configuring user interfaces that include icons for activating web-clip widgets.